The Mountains of the Tone Headwaters

Where does the Tone River begin? Edo-period books said it dripped from the breast of a stone bodhisattva hidden in the mountains of Fujiwara. In the summer of 1920 Kogure Ritarō went to find out, pushing for days through bamboo and dwarf firs along the snowy ridges that ring the river's head, camping by snowmelt pools, meeting bears and serow, and at last standing on the fan of old snow that feeds the river.

The Mountains of the Tone Headwaters, first published by the Japanese Alpine Club in 1923, is both a climber's guide to these little-known peaks of the Gunma-Niigata border and a historian's detective story, weighing shogunal maps, village gazetteers, a hot-spring diary of 1842 and the letters of sixteenth-century warlords to work out which mountain is which. Three shorter pieces complete the book: an essay showing how Edo maps copied a 1640s survey for two hundred years, a tour of the old mountain names of northern Jōshū, and a warm sketch of autumn at the Oze marsh, with fish stories from the Chōzō hut.

Each work is translated complete from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes on places, plants, texts and units, and source information.